Headline: "Waiting for Godot."

By Joe Gillis. This article originally appeared in Los Angeles
magazine on December 1995. Copyright Los Angeles Magazine Inc.

Abstract:
Director Terrence Malick is profiled. Since his last films were
produced in 1979, Malick has vanished from the scene, continuing to write
scripts but never putting them together to direct.

It was Norma who first told me what becomes a legend most. "Absence,"
La Desmond barked, between sucks on her cigarette holder. Now, 40 years
after Jimmy Dean screwed up, I see her point. I also see that if she took
her own advice, I would be alive today--or at least a lot less
cynical--but that's another movie.

As it is, I floated around, establishing, in the process, the Guinness
record for writer's block (death will do that to a person). This went on,
of course, until the management of this publication rescued me from the
mai-tai limbo that is the Formosa.

Or so they tried. Trouble was, as I began to write more, I quickly
realized that my best sources were the regulars back at the bar. Who can
forget the days of splendor in the glass, I reminded myself, when a bunch
of us unemployables could sit back and dish (without a twinge of irony)
all those Industry legends making quite a career out of not working.
Beatty, for example. For a long time after Reds, Warren developed a famous
case of producer's block--the seducer trapped by his own seduction. He'd
shuffle one big deal after another ad nauseam, but never commit. Foreplay
became his lifestyle, on and off the court.

But the mother of all paraplegics, to mix another metaphor, had to be
Terrence Malick, because his paralysis was one none of us had ever come
across: director's block. In 1979, after writing and directing Badlands
and Days of Heaven, two seminal films in the most seminal Hollywood decade
since the Golden Age, Terry simply disappeared. "From this point on," he
said in his last interview, "I'm being watched. That could trip me up."

The thing was, he kept on writing. He couldn't--wouldn't--put it
together to direct. As the years rolled on, critics and producers would
try to get to him, but he was vapor. Like Salinger. Or Norma. Absence
means never having to say you're sorry. The legend grew.

Then, in the fall of 1992, Malick's partner Bobby Geisler revealed that
Terry was about to do what he'd been unable to for 13 years: pull the
trigger. The project was a play, a production of Sansho the Bailiff that
Malick had adapted from Mizoguchi's film. Andrzej Wajda would direct, and
a workshop production would be given before moving on to Broadway.

It never happened. Take your pick of the rumors. "Terry was there for
rehearsals," according to Days of Heaven producer Jacob Brackman, "but I
gather it was an unhappy experience." Says New York Times theater critic
Ben Brantley: "It was a money problem." Says Variety's Todd McCarthy: "I
heard Terry wanted to direct."

Let's be kind. Malick, after all, made it as an auteur, not a
playwright. And the other part of that '92 announcement was he planned to
write and direct The Thin Red Line--James Jones's sequel to From Here to
Eternity. So what happened?

Not too much. Malick has managed to write several drafts of The Thin
Red Line, one of which he considered good enough to have Kevin Costner,
Ethan Hawke and Lukas Haas read last spring at the home of Mike Medavoy,
head of Phoenix Pictures and Malick's former agent. Ring up Medavoy and
ask him what's what, and you don't get a a lot.

Is there any timetable for Thin Red Line? "He's working on it, but
until Terry says it's ready, there's nothing to tell. You know the
piece--it's a follow-up with those characters ending up at Guadalcanal.
What he's working on is how they sound."

How did they sound to you?

"Well I haven't read the latest draft."

You're not asking him how it's going.

"That's the one thing you don't do."

People like him are so rare, with such quality of vision," says
screenwriter Bill Witliff. It's a sentiment that has echoed around
Hollywood for years, the feeling that Malick, like Dean, had the makings
of an American genius. Indeed, Badlands, released in 1973, is a coolly
ironic drama about a spree of murders committed by a young psychopath who
resembles Dean. Based on the Charles Starkweather case, Badlands is an
undisputed classic. But it was Days of Heaven, released in late 1978, that
brought forth the label of genius. Set on a sprawling wheat farm in the
Texas panhandle in 1916, the story--the tragic intertwining of three
migrant workers with the farm owner--was enhanced by Malick's decision to
bypass the usual dramatic devices and go for a tapestry-like effect.

When it was shown to Paramount execs and Gulf & Western chairman
Charlie Bluhdorn, everyone was impressed, but Bluhdorn was truly
touched--so much so, he gave Malick a gift of $1 million, paid out in
annual amounts of $100,000 to $200,000. The string: Malick would make his
next film, whenever and whatever that would be, for Paramount.

Perhaps Bluhdorn, known for his eccentricities, recognized a kindred
spirit in Malick. "Terry seemed very much the artist, which my father
enjoyed," says Paul Bluhdorn, an ex-Paramount exec. It seems almost
poignant that the money kept pouring into Terry's bank account even after
Charlie's death.

But the gift may have been Malick's undoing: It may have given him too
much freedom. "I knew he wasn't long for this business," says Don Simpson,
who spent time with him on Days of Heaven. "He never loved the movies--he
was more the philosopher."

In fact, Malick began thinking of quitting just after Days of Heaven
opened, when he visited Bluhdorn's estate. "There was so much expectation
placed on Terry, and he was feeling all that pressure," Paul Bluhdorn
recalls. "His idea was to put distance between himself and let it die
down."

And yet in the summer of 1978, Malick had begun work on Q--easily his
most ambitious project. The original concept was a multicharacter drama
set in the Middle East during World War I, with a prologue set in
prehistoric times. But after dispatching an assistant for 10 weeks to
scout locations, Malick chucked the Middle East section. By the end of the
year, the prehistoric prologue had become the whole script.

Imagine this surrealistic reptilian world," says Richard Taylor, a
special-effects consultant Malick hired. "There is this creature, a
Minotaur, sleeping in the water, and he dreams about the evolution of the
universe, seeing the earth change from a sea of magma to the earliest
vegetation, to the dinosaurs, and then to man. It would be this
metaphorical story that moves you through time."

Malick covered a lot of ground and spent a bundle of money preparing to
film Q. By midsummer 1979, Paramount had become very frustrated trying to
reconcile the mounting bills with the director's ever-evolving concept.

"It got to the point that whatever people wanted, he wouldn't give it
to them," Taylor remembers. "Because he was expected to make a movie, he'd
say, 'I don't want to.' One day he went to France, and that was it." What
was thought to be a brief vacation turned into a permanent one. Says
Witliff: "I think the more applause he got, the more frightened he got."

Much of Malick's life since has been spent avoiding that fright. He
lives now with his second wife (a former Parisian guidance counselor whom
he married in 1988 and her daughter. He writes and travels, spending half
his time in Paris and the other half at his apartment in Austin, with
stopovers in Oklahoma to visit his brother and father. Or he pops up on
either coast. In the last few years, Malick was said to be in New York
working as an adviser on an experimental film; visiting Sam Shepard (the
farmer in Days of Heaven) in Virginia armed with a 250-page version of Q
that Shepard thought "absolutely brilliant but virtually unfilmable,"
according to mutual friend, writer-director Chris Cleveland; and attending
a Pasadena Playhouse production, where screenwriter Tom Rickman asked him
what he'd been doing lately. "Nothing" was the reply.

"Maybe he just wants to do something else with his life besides direct
movies," suggests producer Adam Fields. Film critic Andrew Sarris observes
that artists "have only so much psychic essence. Some let it out with one
big effort, others divvy it out slowly. But you only have what you have."
However, few who claim to have read his scripts believe Malick's lost it.
During the '80s, for example, he produced:

Hungry Heart, a reworking of Robert Dillon's Countryman, which Malick
wrote for Ned Tanen at Universal as a kind of modern-day Grapes of Wrath

An adaptation of Larry McMurtry's Desert Rose--written for Rob Cohen
and Keith Barish--with Barry Levinson, at one point, attached as director

His own version of Great Balls of Fire, called by Fields a "much
darker" take on Jerry Lee Lewis than the Jim McBride-Jack Baran script

And, of course, Q.

And yet it seems fair to ask whether, by today's Industry standards,
Terry Malick could--or should--fit in. "I wonder if core Hollywood would
let him make a movie," asks Cleveland. "There's a point where the mystique
of working with a genius evolves into a kind of terror. There used to be a
romance around the enigma of Terry. At its worst, there is now a taboo.
He's one of those guys who has the movie all in his head but has trouble
spreading it around. In today's climate, he's seen as a risk." As
cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who first met Malick at AFI, points out,
"A kind of paralysis can set in when you stop working. I'd love to see
Terry come back. I just don't know if he can."

Forget that his friends describe him as lovable, witty, always
considerate. Or that he's never fallen victim to substance abuse, made
serious enemies or directed a runaway disaster. What Hollywood can't seem
to understand about Terry Malick is that he hides.

Screenwriter David Odell, who attended college with Malick, says, "It's
Howard Hughes time. I have this fear that the next time I see him he's
going to have long fingernails. I just don't understand how someone with
his nature could have gotten into directing in the first place. Directors
have to be gregarious, and he certainly was that in his early days."

Indeed, there is little in Malick's pre-Hollywood bio that suggests he
was a recluse. After an Oklahoma and Texas childhood, Malick entered
Harvard in 1961. A philosophy major, he became known as a brilliant,
self-mocking iconoclast--with no shortage of ambition. Following his
junior year, for example, he traveled to Germany, met Heidegger and
translated Essence of Reason. In 1966 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was
awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, where he switched to Latin
American studies and first began thinking about movies.

Back in America, Malick worked as a journalist for Life and the New
Yorker, which assigned him a profile of Che Guevara. But, according to his
philosophy instructor, Paul Lee, Malick "got drowned in it and never
turned it in." He then returned to Boston in 1968 and took over Lee's job
at MIT. That same year, he made a short film that gained him admission to
the AFI's first-ever class.

There, professor Frank Daniel says he knew Malick would fit in when he
asked him what he wanted to learn. "Karate," he said. "He was like a
sponge," Daniel recalls. "He quickly began absorbing the whole Hollywood
scene." His first move was writing and directing an 18-minute comedy about
cowboys holding up a Beverly Hills bank. Next, he befriended a young agent
named Mike Medavoy, who found him rewrite jobs on a few films, like Dirty
Harry. Then came Deadhead Miles, an original script about a Texas trucker.
While the film has played on late-night TV, it was never released. Malick
felt his script had been butchered.

Luckily, he hooked up with Ed Pressman and Paul Williams, who put
together about $300,000 to shoot Badlands, which Malick had begun writing
at AFI. As the closing-night attraction of 1973's New York Film Festival,
it won unanimous praise and was picked up by Warner Bros. Malick was on
his way. But the notion that his classmate might not be cut out for the
system occurred to Odell as early as the first sneak of Badlands: "The
audience hated it. Pressman was reading through the cards, stuffing the
bad ones in his pockets, but there were so many he gave up. Terry, though,
couldn't relate to the tension. His attitude was, these people don't
matter, the film works, everything is fine."

More than 20 years later, Malick's sensibility apparently remains the
same. Which is why his friends say that if he does return to filmmaking,
it wouldn't be for a major studio. "Making a movie brings out every
emotion," says Fields. "Probably the only way he would ever do it again is
to work on a small scale."

But what about those big projects, The Thin Red Line or even Q, you may
ask?

Well, so did I. Medavoy had already frustrated me, but I thought I'd
try one last time because I knew he was leaving soon for China. What
happened next could only be found in a script. Here's mine:

INT. COLDWATER CANYON HOME--DAY

ASSISTANT: Medavoy.

ME: Uh, yes, this is Joe Gillis. May I speak to Mike, please?

ASSISTANT: I'm sorry, you've missed him. On to Shanghai, I'm
afraid.

ME: Oh. Well, maybe you can help. I've been trying for a while now to
get a letter to Terry Malick. I was hoping for an address.

ASSISTANT: I see. Actually, I could be of help. Terry has just walked
in. I'll get him for you.

ME (to myself): He hasn't given an interview in 17 years]

TERRY: Hi.

ME: Hi, Terry. Joe Gillis.

Silence.

And I'm, uh, we're doing a piece about you, and I'm just trying to sort
things through. About what's going on with, well, to start with, The Thin
Red Line, and, and, Sansho the Bailiff and ... I had wanted to speak with
you, and now that I'm speaking with you, I feel, well, nervous.

TERRY: Don't be, Joe. But I have to say I just don't feel comfortable
talking about it yet.

ME: Red Line?

TERRY: Yeah. It may happen sometime in the indefinite future.

ME: The indefinite future? You can say the same thing about the sun
collapsing. I'm only mentioning this because ... well, you might have seen
an item that said you read the script over with Costner and Ethan Hawke.

TERRY: We did it just to hear how it flowed.

ME: How did it flow?

TERRY: I don't feel comfortable talking about it.

ME: Mike says you're on the third draft.

TERRY: Thank you for your interest.

ME: I don't want to grill you, Terry. I understand the rules--that's
the one thing we don't do. I had hopes, actually, of discussing movies in
general, ones you've been impressed by. Just, you know, shooting the shit
...

TERRY: Well, I appreciate your interest. I guess I do feel
uncomfortable talking about it.

ME (to myself): Ladies and gentlemen, the part of Terry Malick is being
played by Bert Lahr.

ME AGAIN: I'm just one of many journalists who regard you as one of the
best ever and watch your films over and over.

TERRY: You're very kind, Joe. I appreciate it and I feel it and it
comes to me as very encouraging. But I feel uncomfortable talking about
it.

ME (to myself): Open the pod-bay doors, Hal.

Silence.

[Is Sansho something you plan to get back to later? Did Wajda bail]

TERRY:

Anguished, protracted silence.

ME: I know what the rules are. I said I wouldn't grill you, and here I
am grilling you.